Perry has signaled, though, that he has given up on the next contest, New Hampshire’s Jan. 10 primary, to focus instead on South Carolina. And a Des Moines Register poll released Saturday shows that he’s jockeying for fourth place in Iowa with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, behind Mitt Romney, Rep. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

Aide Ray Sullivan said the governor’s advertising blitz — he and supporting committees have poured about $5 million into Iowa — has been reinforced by volunteers making 9,100 phone calls to potential supporters in the last three days.

“There’s a chance he could come in second and a chance he could win,” Sullivan said.

On Fox News, Perry dismissed a Politico report in which several of his aides, speaking anonymously, tagged his campaign as ineptly planned and subpar.

Perry acknowledged that his campaign “had some bumps and grinds” but said that to engage over anonymous reports is a “waste of time.”

Perry repeated his attacks on Santorum, who is thought to have the most momentum in Iowa, over the former Pennsylvania senator’s votes to raise the federal debt ceiling and for spending bills that contained pork projects.

Fox host Chris Wallace noted that Santorum has hit back at Perry by calling him a hypocrite, given that Texas has hired lobbyists to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in congressional earmarks under Perry.

“That is the process that they put in place in Washington, D.C.,” Perry said. “The reason that states have to go up there and play that game is because Washington is broken.”

He later attended services with his family at the Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines.

Sunday night, Perry and his wife, Anita, were spotted dining with billionaire publisher Steve Forbes, who’ll stump with the governor Monday. They were at Django, a French restaurant in downtown Des Moines.

The other Texan in the race, Gulf Coast congressman Ron Paul, also appeared on Fox, arguing that his failure to enact much legislation in a long congressional career wouldn’t hamper him as president.

“To elect me, the country has to change … which means the Congress will change,” he said. “Now I’m a serious contender.”

He defended an assertion from his 1987 book Freedom Under Siege that the government shouldn’t protect workers from sexual harassment, saying that anyone who feels harassed bears some responsibility if he or she doesn’t quit the job.

Police should deal with acts of violence, Paul said, but “because people are insulted by rude behavior, I don’t think we should make a federal case out of that.”

Paul, who was home in Texas for the weekend, expressed confidence in his position in Iowa. “The die has been cast,” he said.

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